Description and prediction of reading decoding skills in Swedish children with Developmental Language Disorder.

The results on a combined measure of the word and nonword decoding indicated that only 18% of the children had age-adequate decoding skills. The proportion of age-adequate decoders did not change noticeably with the school year. The participants' decoding skills showed larger deviations to test norm means with higher school years. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that the best predictors of decoding skills were measures of working memory and nonword repetition, followed by school year. These factors significantly contributed to the variance in decoding among our sample of children with DLD. A family history of literacy problems made no contribution to the variance. Conclusions: The findings emphasize the necessity of assessing and following up on literacy development in children with DLD.